


Great Atrocities

by riceman



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Human AU, No pairings - Freeform, Other, aka WWI, are there any others i'm forgetting, probably, the Great War AU, this is short but pretty intense so viewer discretion is advised
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 04:38:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1885416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riceman/pseuds/riceman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Great War: Journal of Toris Laurinaitis: Day 249</p>
<p>"...but I guess you do what you have to to survive on the battlefield....we won't come home as heroes. We won't come home at all." </p>
<p>--</p>
<p>pretty much what it says in the tags c':</p>
            </blockquote>





	Great Atrocities

**Author's Note:**

> okay tbh this was a writing assignment for my Western Civ summer school class. we had to work in groups to create a newspaper during WWI, aka the Great War. 
> 
> my part of the project was to write a journal entry from a soldier to publish in the paper, but tbh i think i would've done better if they gave me the part of writing about the atrocities. sometimes life just ain't flipping fair c':
> 
> final note: yeeeeah i'm posting it here because i used human AU hetalia characters please don't shame me i do enough of that myself OTL

The Great War: Journal of Toris Laurinaitis: Day 249

Raivis’s trenchfoot is getting worse. Both of his big toes are now black as the rats that feed on the lifeless soldier sitting a couple feet away from us. Gilbert Beilschmidt, his name is - or was, anyway. He was a rude man, and painfully obnoxious, but he did something - I’m not sure what it was - to boost our moral. Well, most of ours anyway. I never trusted him, not since he used Matthew to protect himself from a falling shell on the frontline. But I guess you do what you have to to survive on a battlefield. And Matthew, poor Matthew, there’s nothing left of him - not even a body to bury, much less to send back to his brothers and sisters.

But even so, no one deserves a death like Gilbert’s - wounded, missing an arm and leg, bleeding out in the trench before finally coming to an end at the sharp teeth of the rats.

The trenches are absolutely teeming with the foul creatures. Eduard, who is younger than me but due to certain circumstances has had far more experiences in the trenches, created a device to keep the rats out of our sleeping space. It’s effective, the device going over the sleeping mat to close in the soldier, thus keeping the rats out. Eduard, Raivis and I have become something akin to brothers, and we often sleep curled up together under Eduard’s anti-rat top. It’s very squished, but it’s also effective for keeping warm during the night.

Recently, Feliks came up with the brilliant idea of digging tunnels underground from trench to trench so we can travel more safely through the battlefield. He may be a bit of a ditz and quite clumsy, but despite what others say about him, Feliks is a genius.

However, these tunnels are not without their drawbacks - sometimes the soldiers get stuck in the little hideouts and holes along the way and are forced to sit and wait in the dark for hours with no sound but the falling shells and hisses of gas outside. It can literally drive a man insane - that’s what happened to Tino, the man who Eduard signed up with.

One day Eduard came out of one of the tunnels back into mine and Raivis’s trench, face pale and eyes glossed over with a kind of morbid horror that cannot be described in words.

“What happened? Where’s Tino?” one of our comrades had said. Eduard just shook his head, nothing coming out of his mouth but a strained croaking noise.

“What happened, VonBock?!” Berwald repeated.

When Eduard finally recovered enough to speak, he told us how he and Tino had been trapped in a tunnel for over eight hours, sitting and waiting in the dark and listening to the contorted screams of the soldiers fighting above them. One of our comrades had stumbled into the tunnel in hopes of escaping death, but to no avail. He died slowly, lungs and eyes melting out through his face as his blood soaked the ground, adding a new level of horror to the slugs, frogs and rats already crawling there.

“I can’t sit here and listen to him die,” Tino had cried. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to put him out of his misery.” Then Eduard handed him the knife, which Tino took and plunged into the man’s skull. There was a bloody scream before the man died, falling over Tino. With no way to expel him from the tunnel, both men were forced to crouch in the dark with the body for another two hours.

Finally, Tino couldn’t take it and ran out into the battlefield, screaming mangled words of terror, fear and anger. He didn’t last thirty seconds before a shell wiped him out, the same way Matthew had gone.

The horrific ends of Gilbert, Matthew, Tino, and the faceless man he killed were only a few of the gruesome deaths in the trenches. I’ve seen more death and destruction than even Satan or God watching his kingdom’s twisted souls leave purgatory.

Dear reader, if anyone even reads this after I’m gone - I’m certain I’ll perish soon, what with lacking most of my fingers and having trenchfoot almost worse than Raivis - please take heed. Don’t listen to the posters and propaganda they feed you. It’s all lies - lies that surpass the adjectives dirty, rotten, damned and god-forsaken.

**We won’t come home as war heroes. We won’t come home at all.**

**Author's Note:**

> welp, i hope you enjoyed this. 
> 
> i would like to thank everyone who read this, every hit, kudo and review means a ton to me! thanks and have a great July! 
> 
> (p.s. happy belated canada day and happy upcoming 4th!)


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